ST. MARTINVILLE — Crawfisherman Bill Granger welcomes the muddy Mississippi River water shooting toward his perch on the Atchafalaya River.

To him, the water is a road, a home and a living. Granger, 43, would like to see a full river each year.

On Thursday afternoon, pulling his boat from its swelling banks at Bayou Benoit Landing in St. Martinville, he said the Mississippi River water coursing south is akin to an earlier time that he has heard about only through his grandfather’s tales.

“That was our roads, how we lived, how we moved,” Granger said.

While he still calls the Atchafalaya River’s passageways his “brick roads,” the waterway Granger spends more time on than at home is rarely the river he longs for, the one his grandfather said roamed freely, its breadth spreading to form a plentiful, water world.

For perhaps the next month, as the Mississippi water flows through the Morganza Floodway, the Atchafalaya finally will meet Granger’s idealized image.

Yet during the river’s zenith, crawfishers aren’t expected to have much luck at their trade.

Scientists say that because of treacherous currents, flooded boat landing docks and the fact that the crawfish will disperse throughout the water, making them difficult to trap, critter hunting will soon become an arduous affair.

Already crawfish trappers throughout the St. Martinville area say docking is getting more difficult and that soon levees will become the only possible docking grounds, something most avoid because boats can damage levees, especially when they become damp.

Returning to Sandy Cove Landing, several miles south of the Benoit dock, Mark Bonin, 42, recalled watching his crawfish-trapping father launch his boat straight from the levee during the 1973 flood.

The Sandy Cove dock is now under water. And the 300-yard-long road leading from the levee to that dock now resembles a bayou.

But after the Morganza floodgates shut and the river subsides, crawfish will be everywhere. Crawfish trappers and laymen alike who lived through the 1973 flood recall simply picking them off the levees.

Their abundance largely will be due to the added oxygen in the waterway after decomposing vegetation has been flushed out, said Robert Romaire, a Louisiana State University AgCenter professor who studies crawfish management.

Randy Bourque, 34, already noticed a difference while out in the river Thursday morning. He was out to extend the lines on his traps to accommodate the rising tide.

“During Easter, the Holy Week, it was like a sewage pit out there, smelling, completely black,” Bourque said. “Now everything’s clean, and them crawfish is shedding and getting pretty.”

Higher oxygen levels will keep much more crawfish alive longer than during a typical year, and as more water is expected to remain in the river for longer, the crustaceans also will have much longer to grow, according to Romaire.

While Romaire anticipates a possible wild crawfish season extending as late as August — typically it ends in June — Bourque dreams, “Man, I hope we can fish the whole year.”

James Richard, 57, recalled the crawfish cornucopia of 1973.

“The crawfish ran in ‘73. Everywhere you put a trap, you got filled up,” he said.

Yet Jay Huner, 65, a marine scientist and former director of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Crawfish Research Center, recalled a darker side to that flood.

“You literally could not give away crawfish because there were so many,” he said.

He warned that this year could be the same, “that there is so much crawfish that no one can access it.” In other words, flooding the market with too much crawfish could drop the price below what crawfish trappers need to survive, thereby not making it worth their while to catch the critters.

Another negative to the 1973 flood, Huner said, is “a huge amount of sediment was deposited.” In fact, all that sediment filling up the Atchafalaya is one of the reasons Granger’s idealized Atchafalaya no longer runs as in the good old days.

“It will no longer be what it was. I wish there were whooping cranes flying by my home,” said Huner.

And while Louisiana wildlife officials actually are reintroducing the endangered whooping crane into the state landscape, Huner sees the eventual fate of the Atchafalaya as less optimistic. He said it eventually will fill up completely with sediment through future floods, and simply wind up a hardwood forest with channels running through it, much to the chagrin of the populations it sustains.